Word: josepher
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...thin white bag has moved squarely beyond eyesore into the realm of public nuisance, a symbol of waste and excess and the incremental destruction of nature. But where there's an industry at risk, there's an attorney, and the plastic bag's advocate in chief is Stephen L. Joseph, head of the quixotically titled Save the Plastic Bag campaign...
...Recently, Joseph and his cause have taken a few hits. Last Tuesday, Los Angeles became the most recent American city to take a stand against the bag, when its city council voted unanimously to ban plastic in all supermarkets and retail stores by 2010 if a statewide fee on the bags has not been put in place by then. (It's estimated that Los Angeles uses 2 billion plastic bags a year, only 5% of which are recycled.) Joseph had filed suit against Los Angeles County on the grounds that it did not prepare an Environmental Impact Report...
...month earlier, Manhattan Beach, Calif., adopted a similar ordinance, also over Joseph's objections and legal maneuvers. And last July, Joseph's home city of San Francisco became the first American metropolis to impose the ban. (Joseph has been on the case only since June, so that's not in his column...
...Joseph has a website, www.SaveThePlasticBag.com, which comprehensively details, among other things, how much cockroaches love paper bags; and as a lawyer, he's a pretty good publicist: in 2003 he sued Kraft Foods to prevent the sale of Oreo cookies to children under the age of 11 in California, on the grounds that they were full of trans fat. While he didn't win the court battle, he clearly won the war; Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an anti-trans-fat bill into law on July 25. Earlier, Joseph sued San Francisco's parking department to get the agency to remove...
...former anti-litter activist support plastic bags? Joseph points out, and some environmentalists agree, that in many ways paper bags are just as bad for the environment as plastic ones. While paper bags decompose, they also release methane while doing so. While plastic bags are sometimes made with petrochemicals, paper bags require more energy to be made and recycled. The evidence that plastic bags kill marine life is not conclusive, and it's generally acknowledged that the detritus from commercial fishing is much more damaging. "My research into this issue has proved to me that something funny is going...